[Samba] Win98 asks for IPC$ password

[Steve Litt]

Hi all,

After I converted my Linux desktop from Mandriva 2008.1 with Samba 3.0.28a to 
Ubuntu 9.04 with Samba 3.3.2, my Windows 98 box could no longer connect to my 
Linux desktop via Samba. The symptom was that Windows kept asking for the IPC$ 
password.

Linux clients have no problem with the Ubuntu Samba server. My machine is 
called "mydesk", and on every Linux box in the house, the following did what 
they were supposed to:

smbclient -NL mydesk
smbclient //mydesk/tmp -Uslitt

I opened ports 137, 138, 139 and 445 to both udp and tcp, no change on the 
Windows box. I set the firewall (temporarily) to passs all, no change on the 
Windows box.

I installed Mandriva 2008.1 on an experimental machine, created a tiny Samba 
with a share for /tmp, and verified that the same Windows computer could browse 
the /tmp directory. I moved the smb.conf file from the mandriva 2008 box to the 
Ubuntu 9.04 box, changed only the netbios name, and the Ubuntu machine still 
could not be read by the Windows box, which requested the IPC$ password. I 
added a new user and password to both the win98 and the Ubuntu box, used the 
new user on both -- same symptom. I tried password level=8 and username 
level=8 -- no change.

About 5 times I verified that my username and password were entered via 
smbpasswd -a, and I switched between passdb backend=smbpasswd and passdb 
backend = tdbsam, but the symptom remained.

I used smbd -b to verify that smb.conf and smbpasswd were in the /etc/samba 
directory, as expected.

On the theory that maybe the defaults had changed, I created a new smb.conf 
from the Mandriva machine like this:

testparm -sv > smb.conf.mandriva_full

After doing the same on the Ubuntu box and diffing the two, the main differences 
were  lanman auth,  client lanman auth, and client plaintext auth were "yes" 
on the Mandriva and no on the Ubuntu, but explicitly setting them to "no" on 
the Ubuntu machine did no good. I even copied smb.conf.mandriva_full to 
smb.conf on the Ubuntu machine, changed the netbios name to mydesk, commented 
out the four or five things that caused it to fail, and the Windows box symptom 
remained the same. After every change in smb.conf, I restarted Samba with 
/etc/init.d/samba restart.

I ran smbpasswd -a -D10 slitt, and the only thing I saw that looked especially 
suspicious were a bunch of lines like this:

Substituting charset 'UTF-8' for LOCALE

A web search turned up nothing especially telling about that phrase, but I'd 
imagine if ascii codes are interpreted differently on the Windows box than the 
Ubuntu box while encrypting passwords, that would be a problem.

I'm at my wits end. Does anyone have any ideas of how I  can narrow this down 
to the root cause?

Thanks

Steve

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt